Following unsuccessful attempts to jointly find ways for scholarly collaboration network ResearchGate to run its service in a copyright-compliant way, information analytics businesses, scholarly and scientific publishers and societies are now left with no other choice but to take formal steps to remedy the illicit dissemination of millions of published articles on the ResearchGate site.

A coalition of publishers, which currently includes the American Chemical Society, the American Medical Association, the American Physiological Society, the American Society of Plant Biologists, Atlantis Press, BMJ, Brill, Elsevier, Future Science Group, IEEE, IWA Publishing, KeAi Publishing, Oxford University Press, Portland Press (wholly-owned by the Biochemical Society), Wiley, Wolters Kluwer, and World Scientific Publishing, has been created to provide the scientific community and the wider public with information on activities needed to address ResearchGate’s infringing actions that are undermining the viability of scholarly research.